Crushed between two portals, feelin' like a fool
Using' both of you is breakin' gravity's rule.
Crushed between two portals, feelin' like a fool
Using' both of you is making me into gruel...posted by eriko at 7:43 PM on February 5, 2016 [8 favorites]

Kinda gives me a 2001-2010 feel. All these portals are yours except attempt no portals here.posted by vuron at 7:45 PM on February 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

And now I feel stupid for not reading the tagline to the original postposted by vuron at 7:48 PM on February 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Also Sprach Zarathustra plays.

A shot of the moon in space.

The camera pans down to the planet Earth, then pans left to reveal a GLaDOS Personality Core as the music hits the crescendo.

This is the kind of wonder that leaves me thinking our world is but a tiny fragment of someone's imagination. Infinite inconceivable physics that are collapsing on us, right now, while I'm on the toilet.posted by numaner at 8:35 PM on February 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

And then I read the comments and was filled with an entirely different sort of awe.posted by wotsac at 8:40 PM on February 5, 2016

Crushed between two Portals pushes Valve's Source Engine to places it was probably never intended to go.

If they didn't intend the Source Engine to do that, how'd it know to play that music then, huh?posted by aubilenon at 8:49 PM on February 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

I think I sort of get what's causing this. It's video feedback rendered in a digital environment. It's what happens when a video camera looks at a display of itself. Which is what happens between the portals.posted by scalefree at 9:02 PM on February 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

The machine brought the two portals together very quickly, but not instantaneously. Which means that Chell probably would not find herself in some weird non-space. Her foot would have crushed her head in the very brief moment between when the portals were too close to each other before they were completely adjacent.posted by straight at 10:48 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

So that's what eternity looks like

...I have to go lie down and curl into a ball now

also congrats - this is the first Portal video I've watched that didn't make me want to hurl afterwards (my brain doesn't like fps anything)posted by littlesq at 12:33 AM on February 6, 2016

>It's video feedback rendered in a digital environment. It's what happens when a video camera looks at a display of itself. Which is what happens between the portals.

That's something that confuses me, though. In the developer commentary tracks for Portals, there's a brief digression about how they had to limit portal loop depth to prevent users from slowing down or crashing the renderer when portals fed back on themselves. So I wonder how the video got its infinite feedback.posted by ardgedee at 5:54 AM on February 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Maybe there's a terminal command for adjusting that limit.posted by Evstar at 5:55 AM on February 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Is this... actually happening within Portal?

Well, yes and no. From the notes about the video: For the record: Portals can move. In Chapter 5 (The Escape) at the thirty-third level of the game, you have to place portals onto moving panels to cut neurotoxin generator tubes by using a laser - https://youtu.be/B2gBNwT6aqU?t=2m11s - This gameplay mechanism is not activated by default, so a special command was used to achieve the experiment. I created that simple test chamber by myself in Portal 2 SDK.posted by hippybear at 6:48 AM on February 6, 2016

And here we see the fractal nature of player choice represented in the very game mechanics itself, with each action branching into infinite future actions. Will Chell, controlled by the player, dive into the portal to the left or the right? Both choices lead to the same outcome, another choice, but by a different path.posted by rebent at 7:30 AM on February 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm more impressed that the thing didn't just seg out. Good on the Valve dev team.posted by The Power Nap at 9:44 AM on February 6, 2016

Maybe you should play Portal Stories: Mel if you're looking for new content.

This is a really, really excellent stand alone mod with a good story. It's also difficult. Right from the beginning, you are spending a pretty long time on each puzzle, just trying to suss out the possibilities. However, it's worth doing, especially if you wish Portal at times had harder puzzles.posted by SpacemanStix at 11:05 AM on February 6, 2016

There was a trope in new wave SF stories of hyperspace navigation done through some form of direct experience and psychic manipulation of the superluminal universe. The navigators tended to either go mad, or be mad in the first place - it was all heavily informed by LSD, although I was largely innocent of the existence of same at the time I was first inhaling the local library's SF section.

This is pretty much how I (or the 11 year old me) imagined such navigation. It's also how the 50 year old me imagines navigating through things like a wideband representation of the radio environment, or elements of quantum or cosmological-scale reality...posted by Devonian at 11:17 AM on February 6, 2016

Maybe you should play Portal Stories: Mel if you're looking for new content.

I gave it a try, but it didn't seem quite the same, which left me a little disappointed. I'll give it another go, though, if you guys say it's worth it.posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:10 PM on February 6, 2016

I was told there would be cake.
But I didn't see any cake.
I'm saying I think you have not been entirely truthful on the subject of cake.posted by RobotHero at 8:34 PM on February 6, 2016

Meh. It's a nice piece of machinima, not an exploration of the limits of the Source engine. Graphic recursion, third-person camera, and video feedback are hardly new frontiers; anyone who's spent enough time in spectate mode in the various multiplayer games using the engine will be familiar with them.posted by clorox at 1:19 AM on February 7, 2016

anyone who's spent enough time in spectate mode in the various multiplayer games using the engine will be familiar with them.

That's probably a sufficiently small percentage of humanity to justify saying "Hey, seen this?", though. (I've been playing with video feedback since forever, which I still think itrippy and cool and weird. This is quite the upgrade.)

I don't play videogames, no matter how massively multiplayer, so I don't have anything with a GPU in it. For access to a creative, malleable, hackable space like this, though, where others of similar bent hung out, I'd pony up whatever it takes. I'd want ways to import data and plumb it in, and tools that compensated for me having ideas above my coding/graphic design skill set. Sorta combination 60s new-wave SF reality reconstruction meets Minecraft.posted by Devonian at 6:29 AM on February 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

thatwhichfalls - ahahahaha... I don't remember the story, but the precis you link to makes me think this was one of those that completely crystallised some of my SF tendencies. (And, of course, the outsider/pathfinder/evolved character in Delany;s work carries other significances the 11 year old me was also unaware of...)

Time for a refresher course. And the 'how would this work in a digital reality-morph environment' supplementary.)posted by Devonian at 6:41 AM on February 7, 2016

I'd like to see this again with Atlas or P-body as the player model, because, despite the opportunity for pun, above, the top half of Chell's head and face floating in a surreal void is a little spooky.posted by Sunburnt at 9:54 AM on February 9, 2016

The machine brought the two portals together very quickly, but not instantaneously.

I forgot that in the Portal Universe that exists when you play the game, the quantum granularity of time is much coarser. That is to say, the Source Engine's equivalent to the Planck Time is enormous. I mean, time in the computer progresses in discrete steps that are much longer than the ones in the real world.

Which means that it's entirely possible the portals are brought together instantaneously: one computer "moment" they're far enough apart for Chell to not smash into herself, the next computer "moment" they're adjacent and she's stranded in the "somewhere else" seen in the video. I don't know how the Source Engine works, but it's possible those moments are shorter (maybe tied to how high your frame rate is) on more powerful computers. Which would mean Chell's chance of surviving increases the older your computer is.posted by straight at 10:44 AM on February 9, 2016

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